1926 - THE ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ACHMED, early animated feature film

A very early animated film from a German animator named Lotte Reiniger.  The film is animated with a technique using silhouettes and hand painted backgrounds.  The results are still fairly impressive even today.

The film took about three years to make with all of the drawings beaning moved to match the 24 frames per second speed of the camera, this was probably very detailed and laborious work.

 

The film is a visual treat and many of the effects are very impressive.  For fans of animation, The Adventures of Prince Achmed is well worth a look.

 

The film was written by Lotte Reiniger and the running time is 65 minutes.

1926 - THE STRONG MAN, Frank Capra's first film a real winner.

Frank Capra's first major film is a very good comedy with silent film actor Harry Langdon.  For a time Langdon was considered as important an artist as Chaplin, Keaton or Lloyd.  

The Strong Man is full of  many inventive bits of comedy. You can definitely see that Capra was a talented young director to watch.

The film expertly combines humor, pathos and a large scale action scene toward the end.  It also knows not to over stay it's welcome and runs just a little over an hour.

A real pleasure to watch and possibly a comedy masterpiece from the silent era.

75 minutes, written by Arthur Ripley, Hal Conklin, Robert Eddy and Reed Heustis.

1926 - THE WINNING OF BARBARA WORTH, a large scale western epic

This is an epic silent western film from classy producer Samuel Goldwyn and director Henry King.  The film is well cast with Ronald Colman, Gary Cooper and silent actress Velma Banky in one of those romantic love triangles, he loves her, she loves another guy, the other guy thinks she loves the other guy, etc.  

The Winning of Barbara Worth has large scale production values and much of the film was shot on location on some hell hole Nevada desert location. Watching the film today you can't help thinking this was nobody's idea of a fun production. 

The end of the film features a spectacular flood sequence which is a good example of mixing models and optical effects integrated together.  The effects still hold up very well a film that is over 80 years old.

 

  As usual what shoves pictures like The Winning of Barbara to the back of the bus is it's status as a silent film.  But this is as good a film as anything John Ford directed.  The director Henry King was  a complete pro behind the camera and had a long run making successful entertaining films for 45 years.

89 minutes, written by Frances Marion.

1926 - MARE NOSTRUM, impressive drama from a forgotten filmmaker.

Mare Nostrum is a drama about the sea, a love story and an extremely well made silent film. 

The film was directed by Rex Ingram one of the most important director's in the history of Hollywood.  Ingram is one of the people who virtually invented film technique.  Michael Powell and David Lean have stated that he was one of the most important influences in their careers.  All of this is interesting but really has nothing to do with the film.

Meticulously directed and carefully staged, the film has very good acting from a cast that included Ingram's wife, Alice Terry.  Mare Nostrum is also a very good looking film which benefits from being an MGM production, a studio that specialized in releasing class product.  The special effects are very well done for a film this old.

An  excellent silent film

102 minutes.

1926 - MOANA, Flaherty's study of Savaii Island in Samoa is boring but it wasn't his fault

Robert Flaherty had a big success with his film Nanook of the North.  Paramount wanted to repeat that success and hired Flaherty to film another docudrama in the Pacific south seas.  Paramount was looking for another Nanook of the North only this time on a tropical island.  Flaherty traveled to Savaii Island in Samoa and was pretty much screwed as soon as he arrived.

Instead of finding an island culture untouched by western civilization.  Flaherty found that Christian missionaries had already established themselves on Savaii Island and had changed a lot of the island's customs and traditions.  To start with the missionaries had gotten the islanders to start wearing clothes and abandon their traditional dress or lack of dress as it were.  Flaherty further came to realize that the Savaii islanders actually got along with each other pretty well and there was not much in the way of dramatic conflict to photograph.  

Forced to reconsider his approach, Flaherty paid the Savaii Islanders to reenact the customs and traditions that were quickly vanishing.  Flaherty filmed scenes of people fishing, picking coconuts out of palm trees, catching crabs and making clothes out of tree bark. Interesting but kind of dull stuff.

Flaherty also needed an action climax like the snowstorm in Nanook, but lacking this he instead choose a ritual tattooing of a young male to be his exciting ending.  However this was not exactly thrilling either. Watching the tattooing being done to the boy is also pretty boring,  however it does look like it really really hurts. 

Moana is kind of a disappointment, it has some spectacular photography and some very pretty scenery but the lack of  action makes it pretty slow going even at 65 minutes.  Paramount was extremely disappointed with the film and made Flaherty reedit it into something shorter.

Moana is almost a warmup for Man of Aran.  The shots of the ocean crashing into the island and Flaherty's insistence on having people actually canoeing around in dangerous ocean waves are repeated in Man of Aran.   Flaherty's focus on a typical island family is an approach he repeated as well in Man of Aran.

An interesting film, unfortunately pretty dull.

1926 - MENILMONTANT Avant Garde slasher film

Watching Avant Garde films is always a challenge. Usually the non linear plot structure and the show off camera and editing effects tend to make these films look very silly and pretentious It's as if the filmmaker want's to announce to everyone his crap is art with a capital "A." Taking out of focus pictures and mixing it with shaky photography isn't really my idea of a good time. Menilmontant is kind of a nice exception to this kind of film.

There is actually a plot in this film. The parents of two sisters are brutally axe murdered and the sisters are forced to relocate to Paris They both get romantically involved with the same man. The film ends with a violent death. What made Menilmontant interesting to watch was the technique of the filmmaker Dimitri Kirsanoff. Even with his extreme editing and photography techniques, Kirsanoff kept the story of the relationship of the two sisters in focus. Admittedly the film was melodramatic but it was also very touching at times. Avant Garde films are rarely known for their emotional intimacy or character development. This film was an unusual exception.




The film is only 40 minutes long but it is very layered. Menilmontant uses technique in the service of the story for a change instead of the other way around. A very interesting accomplishment.
 

1926 - 3 BAD MEN, Big Big Big Budget John Ford Western

John Ford's 1926 film was his final western until 1939's Stagecoach. The story is about 3 outlaws taking care of a young woman after her father dies. The film has lots of corny comedy relief from the bad men but it also shows Ford's continuing development as a visual artist. One shot in particular is copied and used as the closing shot of The Searchers.

Ford is now carefully placing his characters against strong scenic backdrops to contribute to the visual flow of his films. By 1929, sound finally does away with silent film technique and it will take until 1935 for Ford to regain control of the visual aspects of his films and move away from the static early talkies.

  

For large scale epic film making the land rush sequence is something to see. The amount of preproduction work involved in this sequence must have been considerable. As usual this type of ambitious sequence is even more impressive when you consider that it was all actually staged without any kind of optical trickery. Stuntmen fly through the air, wagons crash and in one amazing sequence a baby is literally placed in front of a galloping row of wagons and horses. Try getting away with that today. 

Ford said that silent films were much harder work than sound films and after watching something like this you can see why. An impressive achievement with efficient story telling, the film runs about 90 minutes.

1926 - Sjostrom's THE WIND, A Masterpiece

This is probably the best movie I've seen in the last four months. The actress Lillian Gish approached MGM in 1926 with a novel called The Wind. The book was about a woman from Virginia relocating to the American West. She ends up in a part of the country where the wind is constantly howling. The film is a love story, a drama, a horror story and a western rolled into a psychological study of a woman's emotional breakdown.

 

Gish was the producer behind this project. She found the book, prepared a synopsis of the story, hired the screenwriter, picked the cast and arranged for the Swedish Director Victor Sjostrom to direct.

Sjostrom was literally the father of Swedish film. He was a major influence on Ingmar Bergman and appeared in one of Bergman's best films Wild Strawberries in an outstanding performance at the age of 78.

In her introduction to the film, Gish comments that it was the toughest film she ever worked on, and after watching it, she's not kidding. No wimps were allowed making this film, the cast must have taken a real beating during the production.

 

Lillian Gish was one tough little cookie. She started in movies with D.W. Griffith and was still performing at age 96. No film is perfect and apparently MGM was so apprehensive over the film that they literally stuck on a happy ending the last 3 minutes of the film, but ignore it.

The Wind is an outstanding example of a talented European director working with a superb actress and cast and using the technical facilities that a major American studio could bring to produce a brilliant film. Very highly recommended.

1926 - TARTUFFE by F.W. Murnau

Many a liberal arts college student has a tale of suffering through a French classics class. This usually required reading a series of boring plays by various French playwrights. If the student was half clever, he or she searched high and low for Cliff's Notes versions of the plays.

One play usually found in the Cliff's Notes was Moliere's Tartuffe. Tartuffe, is about a hypocrite pretending to be a pious individual. He manages to ingrate himself with a French aristocrat, converting the aristocrat to a type of austere fundamental Christianity. The play is about the attempts by the family of the aristocrat to expose Tartuffe to the aristocrat by revealing Tartuffe's true nature.

In 1926 a noted German silent film director F. W. Murnau did a short adaptation of the play. Murnau was a giant in the German film industry at the time. It appears he knocked this film out in between his  classics, The Last Laugh and Faust. This is a good quick film comedy which has a genuine cleverness to it. I particularly enjoyed the scene where Tartuffe, trying to seduce the wife of the aristocrat, taps on
 her breasts with his prayer book.

 

The film simplifies the play to it's main theme. Murnau was an actual film artist in the true definition of the word. Only 60 minutes long, the photography, composition and acting are staged by a man who knew what he was doing behind the camera.

1926 - THE GENERAL Buster Keaton's masterpiece

Made my son sit through "The General" last night usually considered one of the high points in silent film.  

 

Not a laugh out loud comedy for the most part. BUT Incredible stunts with apparently no movie tricks. Actual trains crashed and Keaton's amazing ability to effortlessly move around a moving train is an unbelievable sight to see. I tried to find a public domain clip to post but the grainy you tube clips don't do the film justice. Kino video has a new DVD of this film. It looks very good.

Possibly the high point in Keaton's career, but he has many fine films he has starred and authored during his silent film career.  This film was based on an actual Civil War incident.

The running time is 75 minutes, written by Al Boasberg, Clyde Bruckman, Buster Keaton, Charles Henry Smith and Paul Gerard Smith.